Cape Town – Former President Thabo Mbeki has called for the electoral bodies in the world to ensure they stick to the principle that the people do govern when elections are held.
He said currently Parliament in South Africa was busy dealing with amendments to the Electoral Laws and MPs were grappling with this question.
When the ANC began negotiations with the apartheid regime in1990, said Mbeki, one of the questions that it posed was that the principle of people shall govern meant the ANC would govern and not the people.
Mbeki, who was addressing the Association of World Election Bodies in Cape Town on Thursday, said the election of public representatives must be through the will of the people.
He said during the Struggle against apartheid the vision and objective in their minds was that the people shall govern.
“For us, this is what democracy meant, that the people shall govern,” said Mbeki.
They engaged in discussions to look at systems that needed to be put in place to ensure that the people shall govern.
“Shortly before the formal negotiations to end apartheid ruling in our country began in 1990 we had preliminary discussions with people drawn from the then white ruling group. We spent quite a lot of time on what meant when we said it was one of the strategic goals of our movement and struggle to ensure that the people shall govern,” said Mbeki.
“Our interlocutors kept insisting that in truth we meant that the ANC, our liberation movement, would govern and not the people. Of course, we contested that assertion, trying to explain what we meant when we said the people shall govern.
“As we are meeting here today, the National Assembly is discussing an amendment to our electoral law. Once again our lawmakers, even as they discuss particular details in the law, are still grappling with the same question, what system should be put in place to the vision that the people shall govern,” said Mbeki.
He said this was a critical question in any democracy across the world.
For that to become a reality, the people must be allowed to freely elect the candidates of their choice in elections.
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